Before He Was Mine

The thing about teaching art to seven-year-olds is that nobody adequately prepares you for the smell, the specific cocktail of paint and pencil shavings and somebody’s forgotten Tuesday lunch that had permanently embedded itself into the walls of the classroom.

I had stopped noticing it somewhere around my second year, the way you stop noticing the hum of a refrigerator or the particular creak of your own floorboards, and now it just smelled like the place I spent the better part of every weekday surrounded by small humans who had stronger opinions about the color orange than most people I knew had about anything at all.

It was a Thursday in late October, and I was the last teacher left in the building, or close enough to it. The custodian, Gerald, had done his sweep an hour ago and given me the look he always gave me, the one that communicated you’re still here without the inconvenience of words. I gave him the look back that said I know, I know, and he shuffled off down the hall shaking his head, and I turned back to what I was doing, which was pinning twenty-two paintings to the long stretch of corkboard running the full length of my classroom’s back wall.

The paintings were supposed to be self-portraits. I had explained self-portraits thoroughly, shown examples, walked the class through the concept, let them practice with small mirrors and everything. What I got back was: four paintings bearing a reasonable resemblance to an actual human face, three abstract explosions that the kids assured me were self-portraits but which I suspected were just really good times with the red and yellow, two that appeared to be their houses rather than themselves, and one that was unmistakably a dog, submitted by Marcus with complete and total confidence. When I’d asked Marcus about it, he’d looked at me very seriously and said, “That’s how I feel on the inside.” I had given him full marks, and I would do it again.

I put Marcus’s dog in the center of the display, because I respected that sort of unshakeable conviction. My speaker was propped on the corner of my desk cycling through the playlist I kept for afternoons like this one.

The light through the classroom windows had gone that specific shade of pale gold that only existed in October, the kind of light that made everything look slightly more significant than it probably was, and the paintings looked genuinely beautiful in it, all twenty-two, even the ones that were technically just enthusiastic rectangles with hair.

This was my favorite part of the job, if I was being honest about it, and I usually was, at least with myself. Not the teaching, though I loved the teaching with a consistency that had surprised even me, back when I’d started. It was the after. The quiet room with evidence of the whole day still pinned up everywhere, the sense of having made something from nothing, the particular satisfaction of twenty-two small people who had walked in at eight-thirty with no opinion about something and walked out at three with fierce and specific ones. I straightened Marcus’s dog a final time, stepped back, looked at the whole wall, and thought: yeah, okay, good.

My drive home took twenty-two minutes on a good night and thirty-eight on nights where the light on Birchwood decided to malfunction, which it did at least three times a week because the city had been meaning to fix it for approximately one geological era. Tonight was a twenty-six minute night, above average, which felt proportionally thrilling given the week I’d had, and I spent most of it thinking, in the loose and unfocused way I always did on the drive home, about David.

Three years was long enough that most people assumed the looking-forward-to-it would have faded. That it would have settled into something more like a comfortable habit, the way strong tea goes lukewarm if you leave it too long.

It hadn’t.

I still got that specific lift somewhere behind my sternum about a mile from our apartment, the one that meant almost there, the one that had appeared in the early weeks and simply never left. I had mentioned it to Josie once, embarrassingly early in the relationship, and she had said “oh you are absolutely cooked” with the satisfaction of someone who had been waiting for exactly that sentence, and she had not been wrong, and I had chosen to find that endearing rather than alarming.

David always had the kitchen light on when I got home.

He was usually in there cooking dinner, and I had developed this habit of standing in the doorway for a beat before he heard me and just, absorbing it. The specific, almost embarrassing luxury of having somewhere to come back to.

Tonight when I pushed open the door I smelled fish, something herby and lemony, and underneath it a faint sweetness I couldn’t immediately place. David was at the stove with his back to me, the sleeves of his flannel pushed up to his elbows. On the counter beside the cutting board, waiting, was a mug, tall, ceramic, the dark green one I always reached for, with what turned out, when I got close enough to see, to be a peppermint hot chocolate, a careful swirl of cream on top like he’d taken his time with it.

“You made hot chocolate,” I said, dropping my bag by the door.

“It’s mint.” He still hadn’t turned around. “The temperature dropped today.”

“It dropped maybe four degrees, David.”

“I know you would have been cold today, though.” He said it with the tone of someone stating something they found self-evident, completely untroubled by the fact that this was an absurd level of detail to have retained about another person. The terrible thing was that he was right, and I hated the cold,

I wrapped both hands around the mug and leaned against the counter to see what was in the pan, salmon fillets, golden at the edges, in something with lemon and capers, and on the back burner, asparagus with that specific char on it, and from the smell drifting out of the oven, rosemary potatoes. He pressed a kiss to the top of my head when I leaned in, and then one to my nose, which was the thing he’d done since the very beginning in a way that had seemed slightly odd to me exactly once before becoming something I’d fiercely miss if it ever stopped.

“How was Marcus today?” he asked, adjusting the heat under the salmon.

“How do you even remember his name?”

“You’ve mentioned him four times this week.” He said it without a trace of complaint, not keeping score, just keeping track, which was a distinction I had come to understand was very David. “Tuesday was the scissors incident, Wednesday was the thing about how he explained perspective to you.”

“That was a genuinely sophisticated perspective explanation, to be fair to him.”

“So. How was he today?”

I told him about the self-portrait, the dog, the full marks, the inside-feelings rationale, and David did the thing where he held a very serious face for longer than was natural before it broke at the edges, warm and involuntary, like he’d tried to contain it and simply couldn’t manage. He had a wonderful laugh, quiet and real, nothing performed about it. “Obviously you gave him full marks,” he said. “What was the other option, deducting points because the kid knows himself?”

“The assignment was a self-portrait.”

“And that,” he said, “is exactly what he made.” He said it like it was simple, which I suppose it was, and plated the salmon with the focused precision of someone for whom it mattered that the asparagus was placed correctly, and set the plate in front of me before putting together his own.

We ate at the kitchen table with the good plates, which was a David policy I had absorbed without really noticing, his position being that good plates were for Tuesday nights, not company, and that reserving nice things for an audience was a kind of poverty he found philosophically troubling.

He asked more about the rest of my day while we ate, and I told him about Rachel’s ongoing cold war with the photocopier, about Gerald’s sequence of expressive looks, about the kid who had put glitter on something I explicitly said no glitter on and done it with such profound calm that I had found it genuinely difficult to be upset. He listened the way he always listened, which was completely, no phone, no half-attention, both elbows on the table and his eyes on me, actually there in the room.

After dinner we moved to the couch, which was where most of the real decisions of our shared life had been made. What to watch was the primary ongoing battleground, David’s taste ran toward things that exploded, which I tolerated with what I considered extraordinary grace, and my taste ran toward things that made me feel nostalgic, which he tolerated with what he considered extraordinary grace. We had a system: he got Fridays, I got Sundays, and Thursdays were open negotiation with no guaranteed outcome.

“I’m not watching the one with the boat again,” I said.

“You cried at the one with the boat.”

“That’s not the endorsement you think it is.”

“You laughed too.” He had a point, technically, but I was not going to give it to him. We settled on a nature documentary, which was our peace treaty genre, the thing neither of us had to concede to, the thing we’d discovered we both actually liked, David because he found genuinely comfort in watching things exist in their natural habitats and me because the cinematography was always extraordinary and I had professional opinions about composition. I pulled my feet up under me and he put his arm around my shoulders with the ease of someone who had been doing it for years, the blanket pooling across both of us.

“Remind me - what did you want to be when you grew up?” I asked, somewhere around the twenty-minute mark of the documentary, because it had come up in class today, a whole rowdy discussion, everyone shouting over everyone else with the conviction of people who had given this zero thought and maximum energy, and it occurred to me, mid-documentary and slightly out of nowhere, that I didn’t actually know the answer for David.

There was a pause. Small, but there, I felt it more than heard it, a particular quality of quiet that I had come to recognize as the one that arrived right before he found his way around something.

He did this occasionally, had done it since early on, when questions drifted towards the time before us. His parents had divorced when he was young, enough that it clearly still sat somewhere in him in that deep-down way old wounds did.

He’d never talked about the before in any particular detail, just enough to let me understand it hadn’t been easy, that he’d closed those rooms a long time ago and saw no urgent reason to open them. I had never pushed. It wasn’t my place to push, and more than that, I trusted that he’d get there in his own time, and in the meanwhile there was enough of him right here to fill any room I was ever in.

“Honestly?” he said.

“Ideally, yeah.”

“A carpenter.” He said it with a small self-deprecating smile, the one he got when he was sharing something he’d thought might be embarrassing. “My grandfather had a workshop. I was maybe eight or nine, and the things he made, these incredibly precise, careful things, ” Something crossed his face too quickly for me to fully catch, a flicker of something older than this apartment and this couch. “It didn’t really go anywhere,” he said, landing on it gently, the door closed again softly and without drama. “What about you?”

“Marine biologist,” I said. “Until I discovered how much mathematics was involved.”

“So teaching by default.”

“Teaching by revelation,” I said. “There’s a meaningful difference and I will defend it.”

He laughed again, low and warm, and outside the October wind had picked up enough to tap lightly against the windows, and inside the apartment everything was amber-lit and quiet and exactly where I was supposed to be.

I fell asleep before the documentary ended, which was extremely typical of me on a Thursday. I was aware of it happening in the slow underwater way of someone going under gently, the volume lowering.

I woke up momentarily when David adjusting slightly so my head was more comfortable against his shoulder, his hand moving once through my hair and then resting. The ring on my left hand caught the glow of the television in the dark and threw a small scatter of light across the ceiling, and I watched it for a moment before my eyes closed, that tiny fractured brightness.

Three years, and the kitchen light still on, and the mint hot chocolate because the temperature had dropped a few degrees.

I had never trusted anyone the way I trusted this man.

Everything was exactly right.

Authors note

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